Thinking Green

Last fall, Performance Bicycle began purchasing energy credits for all of the electricity used in its 66 stores. At the same time, REI pledged that it would buy green tags to compensate for the emissions produced by its guided trips in 2007, including bike tours. Earlier in 2006, Clif Bar began a partnership with the Tour of California to make the event "climate neutral," and started a program with its cyclocross team to do the same.

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While these businesses' efforts to go green are well intentioned, there are limits to a system that relies on voluntary emissions reductions, says noted energy expert Mark Trexler, Ph.D., founder of Climate Services, a consulting firm. "The key issue is that in a voluntary market there are no quality standards. It's difficult to know what people are buying and selling." The two main kinds of secondary-emissions-reduction products are renewable energy credits, or green tags, which represent power produced by renewable energy sources, and carbon offsets, which neutralize emissions in one place by reducing an equal amount somewhere else, such as investing in a new wind farm. To avoid any uncertainty, John Fernsell, founder of wool-clothing maker Ibex, shied away from the secondary offset market and enrolled in Cow Power, a renewable-energy program from its Vermont utility that produces power from cattle waste.

The goal of a voluntary system is to instigate social change that will ultimately result in stricter government regulation. "We could do voluntary reductions until the cows come home," says Trexler. "It won't change the climate. Until we're acting on this as consumers and companies, it's unlikely we'll tell our politicians they need to act on it."

Besides offsets, bike companies are reducing their environmental impact in a variety of ways. Performance now uses recycled paper for print materials and has alternative commuting programs. Specialized recently hired an environmental director and launched a tire-recycling program. Clif Bar has a staff ecologist who switched Clif's trucks to biodiesel and reduced fleet mileage.

Observers say that the bike industry isn't necessarily ahead of the mainstream--Google plans to install a 1.6-megawatt solar-panel array, the largest such corporate facility in the country. But some feel strongly that cycling should set an example. "We spend a lot of time out there," says Ibex's Fernsell. "It's incumbent on us to take the lead."